Sr. Systems Architect, Web Developer, Linux Aficionado.

iPhones.. more reason to hate them..

So for those that know me, they know that I despise apple products. While I respect their creative usefulness, I despise the marketing and the general operation of apple, they just suck.

Today proved to be another straw in my hat for the fight against apple.

As everyone should be aware (in one shape or form), Apple released their new iOS 7 yesterday, woo…. Well, I took a call this morning, a client of ours was reporting intermittent data connectivity issues. So the tech I am, I checked their connection and found extreme packet loss at the Comcast node one hop from their modem. I explained to the client that it looked like comcast was having issues and that they would need to be contacted.

She explained that she had already talked to them, and to her dismay had been told that it was something coming from within their network as the modem looked fine.. Even though it clearly wasn’t. Things like that enrage me, a tech just telling an end user that its their network and they had no issues -_-

So I called Comcast, found that they were having issues at the node above the modem, although the tech did not see any issues with the modem. While I was talking with this tech, I was told that they already had someone dispatched, that they would be at the location in the afternoon. I called back the client and told them that we would just have to see what the Tech saw.

Fast forward to 4:45, I got a call from this same client, she said the tech was onsite and wanted to talk to me. Talking with the tech, he had been doing tests and found that when he unplugged the uplink to our firewall, the connectivity and response times were back to normal levels, the hell right?

Well, since the issue was an issue within the network, I dismissed the tech and started working with the end user. One of the things I was taught with Juniper’s is that they have a superb logging system, at least from my point of view..

I turned on logging on the outside port, and to my surprise, I watched as large data sets ran across going to microsoft and apple IPs. After figuring out that the Microsoft IPs were for checking of windows updates, I narrowed in on the apple ips. The rDNS for the apple ips resolved to a cdn that was dedicated to an iOS 7 distribution, so I pushed a little further, I asked the end user what types of phones they had in the office and she said everyone had an iPhone. Great. I found the culprit, now just to figure out a way to tell the end user that their phones were killing their network.

Lucky for me, the end user I work with at this specific location is great to work with, she is very relaxed even when there are real legit issues. So I explained to her, that it appeared the iPhones were downloading updates, which were causing the network traffic to go crazy. She asked around and checked a few phones, she said that everyone was connected to their wifi, and that there were some that were even in the process of downloading the updates to the system and apps!

So that’s where we end, the end user said she was going to get all of the phones off the network and then we would see how things settle out in the next day or so.

tl;dr iPhone updates suck, they didn’t do rolling updates or anything that would allow them to stagger their updates to help networks, they just pushed it out and expected everyone to understand.. Damn iPhones.